Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/154

124 energy of action, and that somewhat dramatic movement which Propertius attributes to Lysippus when he admires his "animosa signa," "figures full of life." Lysippus rather neglected the ideal and preferred to copy nature; most of his works are in bronze —chiefly statues—rarely groups. But of his groups we seem to have examples here, and these two specimens appear to be like the two famous groups which Pliny describes as works of Lysippus.

According to that writer, Lysippus executed one group of 25 horsemen, comrades of Alexander, who fell at the Battle of Granicus, and gave their likenesses in it; and another group, representing a lion hunt, in which work Leochares was associated with him. One may well ask, as to the representation on the other side of the sarcophagus, what relation it has with Clitus. In the workmanship displayed this piece is like that which we have been studying—excellent; but, in other respects, it is different; the one side shows a battle; the other a chase; the first, a bloody encounter between Greeks and Persians; the second, their peaceful co-operation. We see men fighting here with men; there with lions, enemies of all men. On the two separate sides we mark the beginning and the end; on the one the first steps taken in the long desired enterprise of the West; on the other, the realisation of the schemes inherited by Alexander from his father, Philip of Macedon, who dreamed of the supremacy of the West over the East, of the propagation of Hellenism, of the civilisation of Asiatics by the spread of Greek influence, of the bettering of conquered peoples, the progress of the subjugated. "Into whatever country he marched," writes Carr of Alexander, "he encouraged useful industry, alleviated public burdens, and bridled the animosity of domestic faction." All such beneficent projects had been conceived by Philip, and were carried out by his son. We may see now from these sculptures what was due to Clitus. If Alexander had not been saved by Clitus at that first battle, what would Alexander have accomplished in Asia and in the world '^ Justly, then, in honour of Clitus would such a monument as this sarcophagus be made and embellished by the foremost artist of Alexander's day; but then the arts were already on the decline. Traces of this decline are seen in these carvings; they were coloured. But the painting of statuary was not in use at the period when art reached its perfection; colour was not laid on except in the earliest period and the latest; for example, an unsightly statue of Venus, taken out of the ruins of the first Parthenon at Athens, is adorned with shoes of a brilliant red colour, and in a late age the Romans had the custom of painting with divers colours the white marbles of Greek art. Were the sarcophagi, discovered a few years ago at Sidon, accessible to the Romans?

If we suppose that the body of Alexander the Great was never laid in